Sometimes you may notice that your site crashes at a specific time or day.
You can follow the steps here to try to resolve the issues.
These are some reasons which causes the issue.
1. Search engine bots
– These bots can crash your server due to too many simultaneous connections to your site. The good news is that it means your site is getting high traffic that’s why search engine bots are crawling it.
Here’s what you can do and all of these are optional as the crawling may only take a few days to go back into a normal crawl rate:
a. You can lower down the crawl rate on google or bing webmaster tools.
b. Lessen the links on your homepage.
2. Spam bots
– This is a common cause of intermittent down time. You should use some of the anti-spam features (eg. akismet, recaptcha, cloudflare).
3. Real User Traffic Spike
– Your site has too many concurrent users on at a specific time than the average traffic that your server can handle. You can upgrade your server if you want users to stay happy any time of the day even during traffic spikes.
4. Your site is under DOS / DDOS attack
– This is a common problem of most big sites. A Denial-of-service attack (DoS) or Distributed Denial-of-service attack (DDoS) is an attempt to make your server or network unavailable or unreachable to your users. This is done by hackers or competitors.
5. Heavy addons
– Some addons use a lot of server resources. You should contact the addon developer on how to optimize the plugin.
6. Firewall Block
– You are triggering a firewall rule which is causing your IP to be blocked by the server. Usually this is multiple failed login attempts. Or you triggered a modsec rule when you try to copy/paste a text/content from your text editor which includes so much HTML codes or some PHP codes. The firewall will block you as it will suspect a hack attempt.
7. Very long process of function/feature or cron jobs
– Your site executes a very long process. Some plugins causes a very long process or you executed a command/feature in your site that takes too long. This can also be bulk process like sending too many newsletter, invites or some cron jobs.